


at the edge of chaos

by orphan_account



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Blood and Injury, Canon-Typical Violence, Chaos Theory, Claiming Bites, M/M, Marking, Metaphysical Sex, Prompt Fill, This came out weird as hell, alternate universe pretty much everyone dies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-26
Updated: 2018-09-26
Packaged: 2019-07-17 17:57:24
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,340
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16100822
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Jon is the only one to return from the Unknowing, and he finds the Archives nearly destroyed and Elias in despair.





	at the edge of chaos

**Author's Note:**

> This was intended to be a prompt fill for https://rusty-kink.dreamwidth.org/1380.html?thread=19556#cmt19556
> 
> It...came out darker than I intended and then it came out significantly more PHYSICS than I intended.
> 
> Thanks to Kyros, Zomb, lontradiction, and tea for general support.

It’s dark, in the Archives. Each step Jon takes crunches on glass, and his fingers dragging along the walls come away stained black with ash. Here and there the ceiling has collapsed. He wonders faintly what happened while he was gone.

            It doesn’t really matter. They stopped the Unknowing, but he’s not sure that matters either, not when it cost—Jon flinches at the images. Tim’s skull, caved in so he could see the grey twists of brain inside; Daisy’s head lying by itself on the floor, near something that might be Basira’s arm. The rest of Basira—well. Jon’s breathing is speeding up, and he’s not sure where his feet are taking him until he finds himself stopping in front of Elias’s office.

            There’s rubble blocking the door, but from the inside Jon can hear a faint scratching noise, and if there’s someone in there, he wants to find them. He doesn’t want to be the only one left in this cold, burned-out tomb. So he starts moving chunks of stone and burned charcoal off to the side.

            He’s not sure how long it takes him to move them, because without a window outside, there’s not really any indication of the passage of time. His mobile did not survive the aborted Unknowing, unless you count the weird image he has of it growing legs and starting to dance, but he has no idea how grounded in reality or unreality that image is. But at some point, he manages to clear enough of it that he’s able to pull open the charred door.

            Elias looks up at him from behind the desk. He has a stack of papers in front of him, the edges of several curling and charred and dark, and his pen is making the scratching sound as he wearily writes on what appears to be a mostly undamaged legal pad. For a long moment, he simply stares at Jon, his eyes wide, his shoulders slumped. Then, hoarsely, he says, “Jon. Good god.”

            “What happened?” Jon asks, because of course he needs to know, no matter how much it hurts.

            “Melanie,” says Elias, blinking slowly, almost dazedly. “Martin tried to stop her. Neither of them survived, and I am afraid most of the Archive did not either.”

            “Right.” Jon nods and keeps nodding. He’s not quite sure why, and a moment later, he’s not quite sure how he ended up bent halfway over with his head between his knees.

            Hands reach beneath his elbows, holding him up. “A number of the statements were damaged, but I believe quite a lot of them survived,” Elias says in a tone of voice Jon has never heard before from him, almost a kind of forced cheerfulness. “I was transcribing what I could find in my office, thinking perhaps my memory would—” his voice petered out. “Jon, you’re _alive_ ,” he says. “You’re the Archivist, you’re—” And then he’s holding onto Jon, no longer supporting him, but pushing his face into Jon’s chest, arms encircling him as he sinks to his knees on the floor. “If you’re alive, there’s a chance,” he whispers, and Jon has never heard him sound so desperate.

            There’s a wall behind him, at least; with Elias’s weight bearing him down Jon sinks to the ground and pulls Elias to his chest in a clumsy sort of embrace. He doesn’t know long they stay in that position, either; Elias’s face pressed into Jon’s chest, his hands clutching at Jon’s shirt front. By the time he moves, Jon’s legs are cramping up from crouching, and he slumps even further to the ground with a groan.

            “Get up, please, Jon,” Elias tells him, with a flicker of his usual meticulous authority.

            “Why?” Jon asks him stupidly, reaching out and looping the compulsion around Elias’s throat with strange ease.

            “Because you are what is left of the Archive; you are Beholding’s; you are mine,” Elias tells him. “Because every statement you have read is lurking in the back of your brain, and I can see them and feel them, and I _will not let them burn_.”

            “You—you want me to rerecord them?” Jon asks, casting about for his tape record. “I…don’t know if I can do that, I’ll try…”

            “The patterns are inside you,” Elias tells him, holding out a hand. “If you let me, Jon—I can draw them out. If you will give yourself to the Beholding now, whole and entire, and keep nothing back.” He pauses for a moment, squinting a little. “I do know it is asking a lot of you as you are now. This process should not be done so rapidly, but—” A shaky exhale.

            “But we’re a little low on options right now,” Jon agrees. The prickle of watching fear on the back of his neck has intensified beyond anything he’s ever felt before. “All right,” he says, and the words fall easily from his mouth, far easier than he would have ever expected of himself before he saw—this. This shredded husk, the lurking pain in Elias’s eyes, even in his motions, in the shaking of his hand as he looked up and set down the pen. “What do I need to do?”

            “A blank canvas,” Elias mumbles, as if he’s speaking to someone else, and he passes a shivering hand across his forehead. Then he looks up, puts his hands on Jon’s shoulders, and steers him backwards until his knees hit the edge of the desk. Jon’s not sure what he’s expecting, but it’s not for Elias to press his mouth to Jon’s, kissing him like he’s drowning and Jon is air; it’s not for Elias’s hands to reach up and start to undo what buttons remain on Jon’s shirt front.

            “Ah—” He’s pushing the shirt down, running his hands across Jon’s shoulders, and Jon flinches as Elias’s long fingers brush across the first of the round tender scars he carries. “Elias,” he groans, somewhere between pained arousal and fear; not fear of Elias, not fear of the careful touch of those probing fingers, but fear of what those fingers are feeling, fear of himself, fear of the _stigmas_ left, the imperfections—of course Elias knows about the scars, and of course there was nothing Jon could have done to stop them, but he still feels nothing so much as an obscure fearful shame.

            “Shhh,” Elias murmurs, rubbing a thumb across Jon’s lips as he breaks the kiss. “Shhhh.” He ducks his mouth down and now it’s not his hand on the scars, it’s—

            Jon swears as Elias bites down, hard; hard enough to hurt. Liquid trickles across the spot, and he doesn’t know if it’s Elias’s saliva or his own blood. He jerks as Elias lathes his tongue across the spot and then mouths his way over to the next. “Oh, god,” Jon manages, and it’s the last coherent thing to make its way out of his mouth for quite some time. Elias bites down on one scar after another, and Jon is crying out and squirming and in such a mess of pain and unfamiliar arousal he barely knows which way is up.

            By the time Elias has finished with him, all his clothes are on the floor, of course, and tears are running freely down Jon’s face. His skin is aching and tingling all at the same time, and Elias stands up again and buries his face in Jon’s hair. Jon tries to turn his head, tries to find Elias’s lips, but the other man holds him steady, won’t let him move. “Give me your hand,” he says, hoarsely, and Jon wonders what can possibly done about that hand, slick with Desolation’s burn scars. Some small part of him wonders if Elias means to amputate it, and he thinks he ought to be afraid, but he’s not. For the first time in a long time, the knots of concentrated pain left by the worms are only that, just spots of concentrated sensation, instead of also carrying a horrible admixture of violation and shame.

            “Skin deep, Jon, don’t worry,” Elias tells him hoarsely as he holds out his hand. “This may hurt, though.”

            Jon coughs out a laugh. “I was rather expecting it to.”

            Elias’s owlish grey eyes flash to his. “Yes,” he says slowly, with something of his old cadence lurking in those tones. “I expect you were.”

            Taking Jon’s hand, Elias presses it against the desk and reaches out for something Jon can’t see. Something thin and rough is laid against the hand, and then the pain starts. Jon swears again, his body trying to jerk away no matter how much he tells it not to. “Fuck,” Jon gasps. “Sorry, I— _fuck_ —”

            Elias’s grasp about his wrist is like steel; Jon wants to look at what he’s doing, but he’s fighting too hard to keep himself as still as possible. At some point, he passes beyond the repeated strokes of scratching agony into a trembling, twitching mess, and then Elias sighs and lifts up his hand, red and weeping blood from a thousand tiny abrasions, and takes the fingers into his mouth. Jon whimpers. Every one of his muscles is trembling, and the touch of Elias’s mouth _stings_. “What _was_ that?” he manages, as Elias turns his hand over and licks delicately across the bloodied palm.

            “Sandpaper,” Elias tells him. “Quite a good pencil sharpener,” and Jon laughs, although it’s very close to sobbing.

            Somehow, Elias finds a first aid kit, among all the ash and charcoal, and, even more miraculously, there’s clean gauze in it. Jon lets his breathing subside as Elias carefully wraps the bleeding hand and then looks up at him.

            “So…that’s it, right?” Jon hazards. He doesn’t feel any different, so at one level, he’s not terribly surprised when Elias shakes his head.

            “There are scars other than the physical, Jon,” he says, his own breathing ragged, as if he’s the one who’s still aching and tingling with the pain. Jon frowns questioningly at him, and Elias huffs out a sigh. “You spent a month believing yourself to be abandoned, Jon,” he says, quietly. “I know you still aren’t quite sure what I was _thinking_. That I never told any of the other assistants. How could I possibly care about you? Even the Archivist himself was disposable, you thought.”

            Jon looks away. “How can that matter now that— _this_?” he asks.

            “The scars on your hand and body did not simply dematerialize in the face of greater threat,” Elias responds.

            “Well, it’s not like you can take a piece of sandpaper to my brain,” Jon snaps back. “Or were you planning on kissing it better?”

            “Not quite,” Elias breathes in his ear, and Jon squirms again, abruptly reminded of his nudity, and the fact he’s now perched on the desk with his feet dangling above the ground. He shivers, wrapping his arms around himself.

            “I don’t think you can fix something like that with a blowjob,” he mutters, trying to avoid letting himself think about the images the statement conjures up.

            “This is probably going to hurt as well,” Elias says, leaning over him. “And I will not force you; it wouldn’t do much good if I did. So. Will you let me show you?”

            Surrounded by ash and dust and smoldering knowledge; what choice does he have? But, Jon thinks, there is one. It’s not a very _good_ choice, but it does exist. Elias’s head is drooping already, and although there’s probably some manipulation in there, Jon knows he really _wouldn’t_ force him. And the fact that Elias hasn’t said _what_ he’s going to show him, that’s—well. Very Elias, and therefore suspect. And Jon is pretty sure whatever it is, it’s going to involve sex. So there’s that.

            He can still walk away. The Archives are so weak now that Jon surely could get to his feet and walk out, find Georgie, maybe have something like a normal life. Leave all this behind. Leave Elias to—Jon flinches away from the thought. And it’s partly that, partly the naked despair on Elias’s face and partly the fact his stomach still churns with the desperate, all-consuming, never-quiet hunger for knowledge, but he takes a deep breath and says. “All right. Show me.”

            Elias cups Jon’s hands between his and kisses them, finger by finger, very slowly. Then he begins to undress himself, undoing one button at a time and slipping his dress shirt from his shoulders. He pauses to fold it and set it on the desk, and Jon can’t help it, he’s laughing—no, honestly he’s giggling—at the absurdity of it. Elias gives him a cool look as he undoes his belt and slips off his trousers and socks as well. Jon doesn’t bother to ask why he wasn’t wearing shoes; besides, he’s probably not capable of asking through the laughter anyway.

            After a moment, Elias is standing in front of him, naked. Jon finds his eyes tracing across a thin, white scar that goes down almost the entire length of Elias’s collarbone, then pausing and reaching out to actually trace his fingers across a lopsided patch of discolored skin splashing across Elias’s shoulder. Elias leans forward, reaching for something behind Jon; a moment later he’s sliding a slick hand up the back of Jon’s thigh. His mouth is level with Jon’s ear as he murmurs, “ _This_ is what it was like, Jon.”

            His finger breaches Jon just a moment before the thought spills over into Jon’s head. _The cold wood of his desk, the aching pain in his empty, empty head. It hurts as if he’s beaten it into that unyielding wood, but it isn’t the wood. Whoever has taken his Archivist, whoever has taken his_ Jon _; they have left him nothing, and no matter how he throws his awareness outward, it always returns the same dull aching emptiness, an appalling 404-file-not-found dumped directly into his head._

            Jon yells, hips twitching upward, rocking against Elias’s finger—fingers. Two of them, now. Elias has his head pressed into Jon’s shoulder as he fucks him open, his breathing harsh, and Jon knows that he isn’t the only one making his way through this memory.

            _Alive or dead? The question plays through his thoughts, occupying the majority of available brain power. No point telling the assistants; if Martin knows, he’ll drop everything to go after Jon, and he is the most talented one. The Archives cannot afford to lose both. Elias worries at the feeling, like a tooth aching, doesn’t sleep, forgets to eat._

            “Jon,” Elias gasps. “ _Jon, Jon_.” Jon hooks his ankles around the other’s back and pulls him close. Elias’s hands fall to his hips, pushing him back, and Jon lets him, lets him tip his legs up and— _“Oh!_ god—”gasping himself at the feeling of Elias thrusting into him. He reaches out with a hand, finds Elias’s hair, only then realizes which hand it is and yells in pain.

            _Bargains, allies, enemies of enemies…he runs through all of them, ending with nothing. Nothing but emptiness, aching emptiness, and the bitter knowledge that it is not just the Head of the Institute mourning the Archivist; somewhere in here there is also Elias mourning Jon, and he cannot afford this, cannot afford the twinge every time he walks past the Archives, only to find them maddeningly empty. He needs—he needs—_

Jon’s hand slips in the sweat of Elias’s back, as he tries to rock back against him, though he doesn’t have much leverage. Elias’s thrusts are not even pretending not to be desperate, his muttered repetition of Jon’s name barely distinct from a litany of dry sobs. His thin hands clutch at Jon’s hips as he drives himself into Jon again and again.

            And Jon has lost the memories, or maybe Elias has come to the end of them, but it’s all dissolving into the sensations now. Elias’s eyes, bright, too bright. The scent of ash and smoke and ink beneath it. The tips of Elias’s fingers, digging bruisingly into his thighs, and the wood of the desk beneath him, the sticky feeling of it clinging to his lower back as he moves and shifts. The uneven twinges of pain through his hand as it brushes against Elias’s curly hair, matted with sweat and dust and ash.

            Elias makes no sound as he climaxes; he just curls forward, shuddering, pressing his forehead into Jon’s shoulder again, his hands digging into Jon’s hips. There’s moisture on the shoulder, and it’s not blood, and it’s not sweat. It’s three tear drops, surface tension pulling them towards each other. Jon can barely feel them, but he even knows how they would _taste_ , Elias’s tears.

            It’s like looking at the space from an extra dimension, the feeling clawing at the back of his brain, but Jon can’t quite open himself enough to let it in, too distracted by the pain of his hand and the discomfort in his lower back from being roughly fucked on top of a desk. And then Elias slips down onto his knees, breathing still harsh, the thumping of his heart still well above its normal resting pace of 83 beats per minute, and takes Jon into his mouth.

            Jon groans, all the distraction melting into that single point of wet heat. He’s _aware_ of all the rest; it’s all there, and he thinks he could, given enough paper and enough ink, write it all down, every little piece of it, every object’s worldline mapped out down to the resolution of the universe, but it’s no longer as if random pieces are taking precedence, somehow. The feel of Elias’s mouth—Elias’s _throat_ —filters to the forefront of his awareness and smoothes out the rest.

            He’s close already, with the knowledge all surging around his brain, and then Elias pulls back and looks up at him with wide, strange eyes, face mappable and mapped, and says, in a shuddering, almost pleading tone of voice, “ _Archivist_.”

            The world shivers apart, and the Archivist sees it all, pared down into its components, sees the individual pieces and the vast correlation matrix, extending backwards and forwards in time. The fire at the Archives has set the world slewing away from its fixed point, the bifurcation diagram branching frantically, splitting and splitting, shaking away from _knowability_ , skating thinly on the edge of understanding, but the Archivist _knows_ it all, the past, repeating over and over and over again, and even chaos bows to patterns [1].

            He can only catalogue, but the cataloguing is enough; there is no such thing as passive observation. It takes only a glance here, a glance there, to swivel the heartbeat of the world back towards order, towards knowledge, towards a different kind of fear. The bifurcations calm like the jittery oscillations of a seismograph calming in the wake of an earthquake.

            The Archives are covered in inky calculations, and Elias Bouchard is a small pile of misery, face buried in the cold shins of Jonathan Sims, whose hand, despite the cessation of his heart, is still oozing what is now a very black colloidal suspension through the gauze. The Archivist notes this, as he notes that the perilous situation of the Eye has been remedied. With a flutter that is a rudiment of the person who split beneath his weight to let him grow, he turns his attention on one or two stray electrons, sending them slipping from cell to cell, and Jonathan Sims gasps in a desperate breath.

            Elias looks up, still very _Elias_ , his Beholding not quite recovered from the pain of the flames, and he meets the Archivist’s many eyes. The Archivist gives him something that is an approximation of a nod, and then he slips away into the walls. Elias takes Jon in his arms, and they hold one another beneath those white walls covered in black scrawlings. The Head of the Institute will recover in time.

 

[1] https://www.quantamagazine.org/machine-learnings-amazing-ability-to-predict-chaos-20180418/

**Author's Note:**

> Yes, I did link a vaguely sciencey reference thing. Sorry not sorry.


End file.
